Sunday, March 30, 2014

What’s the difference between listening as a fan and listening as a critic?
I’ve been doing it as a critic for so long I’m not sure I can remember. I was listening like a
critic before I actually was one, because I was such an ardent reader
of the British music press and already half-knew that’s what I was going
to be when I grew up. As far as I can tell, the main difference is that
you listen not just for pleasure but always with the formation of new
ideas as a goal. You want the music not just to satisfy but to give you
new thoughts and new sensations. So this inevitably creates a bias, a
distortion of sensibility.

For instance whenever I have written really rampantly about a new
form of music—like, say, grime in the early 2000s, at a certain point
I’ll have said everything I’m capable of saying on the subject. Unless
the music keeps moving ever onwards, it won’t be able to stimulate new
ideas in me. Most genres settle down after a while—even the most
exciting and fast-moving ones can’t sustain that pace forever.

People who are just fans, who purely enjoy the genre, will probably
stick around longer than a critic-obsessive. But for someone like me,
the way I’m wired, I will want to move on. It may well be that genre
continues to generate quality tunes, but if the broader contours of the
genre or scene aren’t evolving or mutating, then there’s nothing more to
say about it. So that is kind of occupational hazard or limitation—that
you are not that interested in genres, or individual artists for that
matter, who just solidly plug away churning out good-to-great stuff. A
critic—or at least a critic of the kind I am—is always looking for the
next leap forward, the new development. Because it forces your mind to
come up with new ideas, new language.

Any observations on the link between music and the visual arts?

... I would flip the question and argue that music—or at least pop music—is
a visual art in itself. The instances of popular youth music that are
purely about the music are quite rare instances—even Deadhead culture,
which would seem to be not very style oriented, has a lot to do with
light shows and trippy colors (not forgetting the whole tie-dye thing).
But specifically in terms of capital A “Art,” pop music has always been
as much about clothes, stage moves, theatricality, spectacle… about
packaging, album covers, posters, T-shirts, logos, promotional campaigns
… about videos and films too.

Pop is a messy hybrid of music, visuals, lyrics, business, discourse.
In the early decades of pop and rock, pop stars usually had teams of
experts providing these elements: a group would have favorite
photographers, or fashion designers they worked with, promo directors,
graphic artists doing the logo and the album covers. Groups that took a
very active and informed direct involvement in directing all of that
were quite unusual—the David Bowies and Roxy Musics and Talking Heads.
However as the years have gone by it’s more and more the case that bands
involve themselves intensely in all the para-musical aspects of the
band. Look at a group like Vampire Weekend, who design their own record
covers and clearly have firm opinions about typography and such like.
The new DIY artists in underground music often create the whole package
themselves—the music, but also the record covers and the little abstract
or weird promos they put on YouTube. I guess the software used in all
these processes is not only affordable, but the skills required are
transferable.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

DANCING
ON THE EDGE

director's cut, Index magazine, 2001

by
Simon Reynolds

Centro
Fly, Manhattan, Winter 2001. Tonight the club's mainfloor hosts a night called
GBH--shorthand for Great British House. If the night was actually based in the
U.K., the name would be mildly amusing--it's the abbreviation for
"grievous bodily harm," an indictment roughly equivalent to
"assault". There's also a faintly amusing echo of the veteran punk
band GBH.

This club, though, couldn't be more harmless, less punk. The music
chugs along efficiently, a cautious composite defined mostly be what it's not
(not too deep, too druggy, too gay, too hard, too organic, too anthemic).
Groove Armada's "Superstylin'" comes on, and the residual tang of
"vibe" in the dancehall vocal only serves to emphasize how
deracinated and over-processed the rest of the track is. As for the crowd,
they're smartly dressed but not flamboyantly styled, and impossible to gauge in
terms of subcultural affiliation;their
celebration never reaches the level of abandon, let alone frenzy.

I'm
actually here for what's going on in the basement, the 2step night Drive By
(where UK rave veterans Shut Up and Dance are spinning) but on a strange
impulse I climbed the stairs to monitor the vital signs of house culture. And
I'm ambushed by an unexpected fury of disgust, unable to understand why I find
GBH's sub-Dionysian bustle so snugly smug, such a personal affront. And from
there it's a short step to wondering: how come I ever got the idea that dance
culture was meant to be an arena for danger in the first place? Right now, none
of the styles of postrave floor fodder that rule the
clubs--"progressive," trance, filter house, tech-house, hard
house--substantiate the notion of dance-with-edge.

Flash
back, ooh, 23 years.Disco is still at
its height, and although discophobes are calling for its death, it actually
seems, in 1978/79, that rock is the one that's ready for last rites. Out of
those mobilized by punk, the smartest minds are arguing that traditional
rock'n'roll is exhausted and the way forward involves embracingthe rhythms and studiotechniques ofdisco and dub.This
"anti-rockist" vanguard--Public Image Ltd, Talking Heads, Gang of
Four, James Chance, Pop Group, A Certain Ratio, to name just a few--share David
Byrne's belief that "black dance production is a bigger revolution than
punk."

But
they don't want to simply copy black dance music as closely as possible, in
that time-honored, over-reverential white bluesman/blue-eyed soul/wigga
tradition; they want to mutate it, warp it, infect its upfulness with angst, militancy, and political despair.

Two
songs from this punk-funk moment seem especially emblematic, and could be said
to have changed my life. PiL's "Death Disco" was actually a UK Top 20
hit in the summer of 1979, and I can vividly recall the pained expression on
the presenter's face as he announced the group's appearance on Top of the Pops
(England's equivalent to American Bandstand)."Death Disco" shattered the show's merry light entertainment
atmosphere: over Keith Levene's soul-flaying guitar and Jah Wobble's
dark-surgingdisco-style "walking
bassline", ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon howled muezzin-style as he anatomized
the horror oflooking into his mother's
eyes as she lay on her deathbed.

The
other funk noir tune is "Dance of the Screamers" by Ian Dury &
the Blockheads, who weren't generally thought of as part of the post-punk
vanguard. Indeed by 1979's Do It Yourself they'd crossed over as massively
popular entertainers in the UK: the once-menacing Dury clasped to the British
public's bosom as the chirpy Cockney king of comedy-rock."Dance of the Screamers," that
album's stand-out song, is no barrel of laughs though. The sound is slick disco
(the Blockheads were shit-hot, session-quality funkateers) but the lyric devastates
the party vibe, reimagining the dancefloor as a killing field for social
cripples and lost 'n' lonely losers desperate for love. Eventually Dury
abandons words altogether, his hoarse howls of agony sparring with Davey
Payne's freeform sax-blasts.

Dancing
in the dark (figuratively and literally) to "Death Disco" and
"Screamers"--this was my introduction to dance music. Later I fell
for the punk-funk paroxysms of Delta 5 and Gang of Four, thepolyrhythmic panoramas of Talking Heads'
Remain In Light, the dark absurdist "mutant disco" of Was (Not Was),
the Chic-for-sociopaths of Defunkt. The latter, hailed at the time as funk's
very own Sex Pistols but now almost totally forgotten, was formed by James
Chance'sestranged horn section (New
York between 1979-82 was a hotbed of groups based around the notion of
dance-with-edge). Leader Joe Bowie defined the group as a revolt against the
sedative culture of disco: "We've got to wake up again and Defunkt
are part of that resurgence of thought."

By
1983, though, the notion of avant-funk or punk-funk had run out of steam,
trapped itself within its own cliches: sub-Miles trumpet-heard-through-fog,
neurotic slap-bass, guttural pseudo-sinister vocals,Ballard and Burroughs references. The leading
edge of white alternative music recoiled from the dancefloor. Groups as diverse
as The Smiths, Husker Du, REM, Jesus & Mary Chain, restricted their
influence-intake to the whitest regions of rock's past: The Byrds folk-rock,
Velvet Underground, rockabilly. Still, the core contention of the punk-funk
project--that rock's hopes ofenjoying a
future beyond mere antiquarianism (the Cramps, the White Stripes) depends on
assimilating the latest rhythmic innovations from black dance music--never
entirely disappeared.

What
happened was that the next-wave of postpunk groups, like Scritti Politti and
New Order, fully embraced the latest black dance styles (electro, synthfunk)
and their tools (drum machines, sequencers, Fairlight samplers), infiltrating
their doubt or dread into the mix via the lyrics and vocal approach, but not
tampering with the music to any great degree.Other ex-punks (Paul Weller's Style Council, Simply Red) just took on
blackness wholesale: the music, the lyrical language, the soul style of
vocalisation. And for quite a long period in the Eighties, this was the
consensus: that the best white artists could do with black music was try not to
fuck with it, for fearing of fucking it up. Emulate, not mutate.

This
"soulboy" consensus was rudely shocked by the arrival of acid house
in 1987. Gospel-influenced song-based house was highly palatable (Weller even
made a deep house record) but the harsh futuristic attack of the Roland 303
acid bass was greeted with appalled incomprehension: "it's so cold, so
mechanistic---where's the soul?!?!". To which my response, was
"exactly, exactly, and who cares?", Hearing the early Chicago acid
tunes was like the totally unscheduled resurrection of avant-funk,
half-a-decade after its demise, and half-a-world away from its birthplace in
Britain and Germany. In songs like Phuture's "Your Only Friend" and
Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control", you could hear uncanny echoes of PiL,
Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo: the inhibited and coercive treadmill rhythms, the
constipated basslines, the desolate dub-space. Even theimagery evoked by the track titles or
stripped-down vocal chants--trance-dance as control, a sinister subjugating
form of hypnosis; scenarios of mindwreck, abduction, paranoia---was just totally
1981.And as it happened, some of the
acid house pioneers were influenced by the early avant-funk and synth
experimentalists, from Throbbing Gristle to German outfits like DAF and
Liaisons Dangereuses (both huge on Chicago's early Eighties dancefloors).

It was
only right and proper, then, that the pan-European subcultural upsurge
triggered by acid house allowed many original avant-funkers to resurface.
Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk formed Sweet Exorcist and made some of era's
classic "bleep techno";Graham
Massey, 808 State's musical genius and future Bjork collaborator, was formerly
of minor avant-funk outfit Biting Tongues. Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV's
Genesis P.Orridge, Soft Cell's Dave Ball, Youth from Killing Joke, 400 Blows's
Tony Thorpe, Torch Song's William Orbit, Quando Quango's Mick Pickering....
there's an endless list of avant-funk veterans whose dormant careers were
instantly revitalized by the new context created by the synergy of house and
Ecstasy. The concept of "rave" itself, with its multiple connotations
of madness, fury, and deranging euphoria, seemed to me like pure punk-funk in
spirit: the ultimate merger of aggression and celebration.

Between
1991 and 1993, as rave turned to hardcore, hardcore tojungle, it really did seem like the
reactivation of the avant-funk project, except on a mass scale. This was a
populist vanguard, a lumpen bohemia that weirdly mashed together the bad-trippy
sounds of art school funk-mutation with a plebeian pill-gobbling rapacity that
recalled the vital vulgarity of Oi! (In the early Eighties, your 23 Skidoo art
students and your Oi!-punk proles would have been deadly class enemies). In
particular, the transitional sound of "darkside"--febrile hyperspeed
percussion, ominous basslines, dizzy sensations of harrowing bliss, a haunted/hunted
vibe of spooked-out paranoia---was uncannily redolent ofthe soundtrack of my youth: Death Disco, Pt
2.Indeed "darkside"'sreflected a moment circa 1992-93 when Ecstasy
abuse was starting to exact its heavy toll, transforming many into braindead
zombies and a few into actual real-deal corpses.

****

To be
a participant in the underground rave scene of the early Nineties was
electrifying, like being plugged into currents of revolutionary energy. The
sensation was explosive: energy exploding into public space (with illegal raves
and warehouse parties), energy exploding across the airwaves (with pirate
radio), energy exploding through the music itself, which felt like it was
propelled pell-mell by a mutational momentum that was uncontainable.

And
then a strange thing happened--all that unruly, turbulent energy, and all that
borderline-criminal activity, started to get orderly and organized. Clubs and
labels became business-minded, looking towards steady long-term profits rather
than quick killings, and thinking like corporations rather than buccaneers.
Raves in the "darkside" erabecame too edgy for all but a diehardcore of headstrong nutters, and
alienated by the moody, paranoid vibes, many ravers returned to the clubs, with
their safer atmospheres andpredictable
satisfactions. Gradually, the punk principles that informed the original rave
scene ( the crowd-as-star, the anonymity of producers and DJs, "faceless
techno bollocks") faded with the emergence of a global circuit of
superclubs and a hierarchy of superstar DJs: pseudo-personalities like Paul
Oakenfold, Bad Boy Bill,Lottie, Paul
Van Dyk, Dave Ralph, who travel the world earning fat fees and racking up the
Air Miles.

The
music changed too, the fever and fervor of hardcore rave gradually tempered
into something milder. On the global quasi-underground of superclubs, the
dancefloor is dominated by the whiter-than-white sounds of trance and its
mature cousin "progressive" (the sound made famous by Sasha &
Digweed at the late unlamented Manhattan superclub Twilo, among other places).
Anthemic and sentimental, trance has a certain cheese-tastic anti-snob allure:
in some sense, it is still music for ravers. Punkless and funkless,
"progressive" is definitely a post-rave style.Musically, it's somewhere between a
de-anthemized trance and a house music utterly purged of blackness, gayness,
sexuality, humor. What's left is a faint aura of ersatz futurity, spirituality,
cosmic-ness. Sleek, abstract artist names like Evolution,
Breeder, Hybrid, Moonface, Quivver, Lustral, and vapidly big-sounding track
titles like "Force 51", "Syncronized Knowledge","Gyromancer", "Enhanced",
"Carnival XIII", "Descender", "Supertransonic"
seem almost subconsciously designed to to avoid conjuring real-world evocations
or resonances.

Purging all the
aspects of rave that harked back to earlier youth movements like hippie and
punk, progressive has achieved a blank purity, sterile and non-referential.
It's the nullifying soundtrack for experiences sealed off from everyday
life--the sanitized debauchery that superclubs are in the business ofcatering for, despite their front of
co-operation with the authorities against drug use. Beyond "edge" in
the subcultural sense, the very sound of the music lacks edges --your typical
progressive track is a featureless miasma of samey-sounding texture and
mid-tempo surge-pulses,blurring
indistinguishably into the next track as DJs compete to perfect the craft of
the seamless, pointlessly prolonged mix. It's music that doesn't explode with
crescendoes and climaxes, but slow-burns, simmers. And thisimplosive aesthetic mirrors the way the club
industry has successfully corraled and contained the once anarchic energies of
rave.

Part of progressive's selling point is its image as
streamlined pleasure-tech. The tracks are mere components for the mixscapes
assembled by the ultra-skilled technicians who travel the global superclub
circuit. Temples oftoo-easy hedonism
like Gatecrasher, Cream, Ministry of Sound, actually use their very leisure
industry corporate-ness as part of their image and sales pitch: the logos, the
slogans like Gatecrasher's "Market Leaders In Having-It-Right-Off Leisure
Ware," the merchandising and spin-off compilations, all communicate the
sense of quality guaranteed, a reassuring predictability. You get what you pay
for, the superclubs and superjocks seem to be saying; your precious leisure
time is safe inprofessional hands. But
Progressiveembodies the ultimate
vacuousness of pleasure as its own justification. For without difficulty (the
physical commitment of actually journeying to a remote rave, or a shady club,
say), you get what you pay for and
nothing more. The "surplus value" that came with participating in
the rave underground--with its possibility of either wild adventures or a total
bust--has disappeared as an option.The
superclubs are like department stores or shopping malls, the dancers like
consumers or spectators. Factor in the Ibiza-isation of dance culture, and the
Spring Break-isation of Ecstasy, and you have a depressing picture: the
transition from rave as counterculture to clubland as a mere supplement or
adjunct to affluent, aspirational, enjoyment-oriented lifestyles. A dance
"culture" without even the transcendent escapist frisson of the
original disco. Because with lives so well-adjusted and abundant, why would you
even need to escape at all?

I have this far-fetched theory that Daft Punk's album of last
year, Discovery--with its titillating infusions of late Seventies AOR, soft-rock,
and lite-metal, its evocations of Frampton, 10CC, Van Halen, ELO, Buggles, and
the actual recognisable Supertramp keyboard lick on "Digital
Love"---was trying to make a point: that dance music right now has a lot
in common with American rock at its most toothless, radio-programmer-castrated,
emollient (all those groups ruled the radio roost during the
punk-never-arrived-here FM void of 1976-80). Almost as if, by making this
unhappy resemblance blatantly obvious, Daft Punk could somehow prompt a real Dance-Punk
into existence. Well, I said it was far-fetched theory.

Another
abreactive symptom of this dawning sense of dance culture as a dead end, as a
new decadance, is the resurgence of interest in the original dance-with-edge:
avant-funk, mutant disco, early Eighties proto-house. Compilations like In The
Beginning There Was Rhythm: The Birth Of Dance Music After Punk,Disco Not Disco, andNine O'Clock Drop (complete with compiler
Andrew Weatherall's sleevenote railing against the way dance music has become
"the soundtrack to complete an easily assembled life(less) style.... the
soundtrack for ad agency pick and mix culture snitches"). Reissues of 23
Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, ESG.Clubs
like Mutants and Transmission. Then there's the plethora of contemporary groups
who are taking cues from the early Eighties: Playgroup, with their loving
pastiches of New York mutant disco and synth-funk, their Pigbag and Specials
homages; theKraftwerk circa Computer
World meets Todd Haynes circa Safe anomie & modernity of Adult; the art
school bop and Sprockets-funk of Berlin's Chicks On Speed; Le Tigre's lo-tech
agit-funk, all spiky riffs and rad-feminist sloganeering.

Angular,
scrawny, not-quite-fluid, early Eighties postpunk dance is a world away from
the plumply pumping satisfactions of modern dance music, the supple repleteness
of its production. What seems appealing to contemporary ears about that period
of punk-funk is its very failure to be funky in a fully-realised fashion.And that brings us back to the original
question of what the white boys and girls can bring to the party? Precisely
their alienation, their awkwardness and unrelaxedness, their neurosis, their
inability to swing (think David Byrne's persona: the geeky consumer-commuter
burb-dweller straining to "stop making sense," trance-out). It was
this very Euro-WASP stiltedness and coldness that was so inspiring to the
original Detroit techno people (a paradox that Carl Craig crystallized with the
insight: "Kraftwerk were so stiff, they were funky"). Rave culture
once offered a transgressive ecstasy, but after ten years of
professionalisation and technical refinement, rapture has become routizined,
bliss banal. No wonder that a new generation is rejecting the very notion of
trance-dance as narcotic, lulling, null, and grasping instead for some kind of
edge. Rather than the ease of release offered by house music in its many forms,
tension and unease seem desirable again, for their own sake.

(contribution to a set of responses to the World Trade Center attacks by musicians and critics)

The Wire, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

In the aftermath of9/11/2001, commentators in every field of art and entertainment joined
the culture-wide consensus-chorus that "nothing will ever be the same
again". Many argued that a new spirit of civic commitment and
self-sacrifice would inevitably spill over to culture, with artists becoming
more engaged and tackling more profound themes, and the public craving deeper,
more demanding work. There were hasty announcements of"the end ofirony", predictions that a new
seriousness would wipe away the vapid, trivial pop culture of the last decade
or so.

The precedent that everyone seems to be reaching back for is
WW2 and the reconstruction that followed: the moral (and morale) uplift created
by a stark Good Versus Evil struggle, and the sheer energy and can-do spirit
generated by the mobilisation of entire populations and economies, led to hopes
of rebuilding a better world. But the "WTC-as-Pearl-Harbor/Bush &
Blair as Roosevelt & Churchill" parallel doesn't really hold;at best, this is a choice between lesser evils. For most of
us non-combatants, the "war against terror" will be passive and
ultimately enervating, as we watch the professionals rain death (and food
parcels) down on remote populations, while the home front will entail the emergence
of an Israel-style security state, with a constant and debilitating sense of
being both under siege and under surveillance.It's hard to imagine either a massive project of social renewal like the
Welfare State, or a great era of artistic creativity, coming out of this.

It's not at all clear how the repercussions of 9/11/2001
will play out in pop culture, let alone itssemi-popular and marginal adjuncts. With a few exceptions (hip hop, most
notably), music had seemed like it was ever more compartmentalized and
sealed-off from "the real world", developing according to its own
self-reflexive trajectory.But maybe
History will impact pop music andrecreate the conditions that prevailed in the postpunk era. When I was a
lad, bands rarely mentioned music in interviews, political issues were so
much more urgent; it was a context in which a song like UB40's "The Earth
Dies Screaming" getting on Top of the Pops seemed like a crucial
intervention. The recent spate of rock bands like Radiohead and U2 speaking out
against globalisation, Third World debt, etc. already suggested a return to
activism, altruism, and earnestness. Actually, having chafed against the irony
culture for a long while, I already feel a slight pang for that cosy, harmless
decadence. Indeed, it seems likely that a certain sort of acerbic, bitter irony
is going to be an essential weapon in these days of bizarre reversals--like the
way Bush, the President dedicated to narrowing the gap between
church and state, has suddenly been recast as global defender ofsecular liberalism against theocratic
absolutism.

Where the WTC horror mighthave at least a temporary dampening effect is on musics based onthe aesthetics of devastation: extreme noise
terror, aural bombardments, apocalyptic soundscapes, traumaturgy, ambient fear.
From DJ Scud's "Total Destruction" and Techno Animal's Brotherhood of
the Bomb to the death metal covered by Terrorizer magazine, it all starts to
seem, if not questionable then at least.... superfluous, surpassed by reality.
Like, remind me why this was supposed to be a good thing to be doing in the first place?

The alibi, I guess, is that it's not about vicarious delight
in wanton destruction (as with small boys who love blowing stuff up,Hollywood disaster movies), butabout waking people from cultural slumber,
confronting them with the worst that can happen.In times of numbness, ersatz emergency gets
those atrophied adrenal glands pumping. But when everyday life is sufficiently
raw-nerved, thank you very much, who wants to experience simulated armageddon
as entertainment? Stuff that soothes,or
helps the tears flow, seems more suitable--Harold Budd, Sandy Denny.

Of course, terrible things have been going on for, like,
ever--massacres, massive bombings,

cumulative collateral death tolls that are way bigger. But
as they say, it makes a difference when it's close-to-home.That's literal in my case: I live about one
and a half miles from the site, and even now,a month later, the air is sometimes fouled by the wind-born vapors from
what is essentially a gigantic slow-burning crematorium. 9/11 has fatally
interfered withmy appetite for
"destruction" (meaning cultural/sonic images thereof).Even something like Tricky's
"Aftermath," one of my favorite pieces of music ever,might be a tough listen in the future,
thelines about going "looking for
people" having a new resonance. And maybe my sharing in our 2 year old son's delight as he points at a glistening
airplane in the wonderfully blue skies over Manhattan will from now onwards always be
accompanied by a shudder, a twinge of anxiety.

Some of the more daring commentators have broached the whole
question ofthe carnographic sublime,
writing honestly about the appalling splendor ofblazing fusilages piercing the sundazzled
glass, the sheer spectacle of thetowers
crumbling. Even dotty old Stockhausen, who got in such trouble for his ill-phrased remark about theWTC attack as "the
greatest work of art in history," was clumsily reaching towards something
worth addressing: the extent to which apocalypse, carnage and cataclysm are
embedded in the "libidinal economy" ofthe avant-garde. From Hendrix's aural
pyromania to Einsturzende Neubauten's End Times scenarios, from underground hip
hop producer El-P titling his solo album Fantastic Damage to kid606 ally
Electric Company using a picture of a collapsing building on the front of his
latest release for Tigerbeat 6, imagery of waste and warfare seem to offer
figures for absolute desire, excess, too-muchness; it's the 20th Century
sublime, man-made (where the 18th Century's sublime was rampaging Nature)but inhumane and anti-humanist.Underground dancemusic of all kinds is full of this kind of
imagery, from drum'n'bass to gabba. For some years now dancehall reggae has
been dominated by fire imagery, whether it's gangsta gunfire or the Rasta vision of
Babylon being destroyedby the cleansing
flames ofJah's righteous wrath (the
fantasy is essentially the smiting of infidels, something that appeals in postcolonial
vassal state Jamaica for precisely the same anti-globalisation, anti-American
reasons it does to Islamic fundamentalists).

The events of the last few weeks have made me question my
own pleasure in this kind of imagery. I've also had pause to consider the way a crusading rhetoric, a messianic, rallying mode of
address, has tripped off my critical tongue at various points over the years--
something that is paralleled by the way underground musics like
drum & bass envision themselves in paramilitary terms, as guerrillas, renegades,
armies of underground resistance,even
terrorists. Then again, as silly and trivial as it seems when the real thing flares up all
around, maybe "culture" is the safest, most harmless place for this
kind of soldier talk. Music and the discourse around it can sublimate desires
for mission, insurgency, single-minded purpose, our will to believe and our
craving for the absolute

From early Nineties jungle to 2-step garage,dancehall is thevibe-it-up spice, the pungent flava added by
producers for that extra tang of rudeness.Beyond this subordinate role as a pantry full ofpatois vocal licks ripe for sampling, though,
dancehall has its own forceful claims as Electronic Music.

Just check the madcap creativity of Beenie
Man's "Moses Cry" on this Greensleeves double-CD for sounds as
futuristic and aberrant-sounding asany
avant-techno coming out of, say, Cologne.Produced by Ward 21 & Prince Jammy, its assymetrical groove is built
from palpitating kick drums, garbledrave-style synth-stabs,and an
eerie bassline that sounds like a human groan digitally mangled and
looped.Or check the quirktronica
pulsescape underpinning Beenie on "Badder Than the Rest", or

It's easy to overlook dancehall's sonic strangeness,though, because the performers' personae are
so domineering. The mix seems lopsided, in-yer-face voices battling with the
beat to control the soundscape, and crushing the rest of the music
(strangulated samples, perky videogame-style blip-melodies) into a skinny strip
of no-man's land in between.The ragga
voice, jagged and croaky, is a form of sonic extremism in itself. Dancehall's
got to be the only form of modern pop where the typical range for male vocals is
baritone to basso profundo. Obviously related to the culture's premium on
testosterone and disdain for effeminacy, ragga's ultramasculinist bombast
sounds simultaneously absurd and intimidating.From some DJs, like Buccaneer, you'll even hear a Pavarotti-esque
warble, hilariously poised between portentous and preposterous.

Elephant Man's own voice is a pit-of-belly boom that opens
up like an abyss of menace, enhanced by a sinister, serpentile lisp.Combine this sort of gravelly machismo with
typical lyrics about exit wounds and tonight being the opposite of your
birthday (ie. your "deathnight") and you've got some seriously
chilling Staggerlee business. "Replacement Killer," a series of
boasts about how coldblooded Elephant is, actually utilises death-rattle gasps
as functioning elements ofthe
beat.No surprise, then, that there's a
mutual trade pact between dancehall and gangsta rap. "One More" is
based on DMX's "One More Road To Cross," "E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T"
rips a Dre/Snoop chorus, and the album's fiercest cut "Somebody"rides the clanking rampage ofthe Yardbounce riddim, a fusion of dancehall
with the New Orleans bounce style popularized by Cash Money Records.

With six appearances on the Greensleeves compilation,
Capleton reaffirms his supremacy over the dancehall already established by
2000's awesome More Fire LP. Like Malcolm X, he belongs to the syndrome of the
self-reformed Staggerlee;like Buju
Banton, he's araggamuffin who turned
Rasta. But Capleton's sanctimony doesn't sabotage his records because instead
of soothing roots reggae visions of "one love", he concentrates
onOld Testament-style wrath and
armageddon: Jah as the ultimate Enforcer, the Don of dons, smiting the corrupt
and ungodly. The gloating relish with which he wields the brimstone imagery of
divine retribution is as powerful as ragga's ultraviolence.Capleton's righteousness and Elephant Man's
ruthlessness are flipsides ofthe same
cultural coin as; God's fire simply replaces gun fire.Even though he's a "good guy" now,
Capleton still sounds like a rude boy.

Friday, March 21, 2014

BIG
YOUTH

Natty
Universal Dread, 1973-1979

(Blood
and Fire)

VARIOUS
ARTISTS

A
Jamaican Story

(Trojan)

Uncut, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

In Jamaica, the DJ
isn't the guy who spins the records (that's the selector), it's the bloke who
chats over the music. As misnomers go, it's a good one, though, since DJ is
short for disc jockey, and the whole art of reggae deejaying is vocally riding
the riddim--whether it's a loping nag as with the mellow skank of Seventies
reggae, or a bucking bronco as with digital dancehall.

Alongside U Roy, Big
Youth was one of the first and greatest roots-era DJs, his smoky voice
unleashing a gentle torrent of prophecy and prattle: "one love"
beseechings, get-up-stand-up exhortations, Psalm-like chanting, but also
boasts, children's rhymes, laughter, shrieks and grunts. As a less musically
compromised natty dread soul-Jah than Bob Marley, Big Youth was a potent icon
of radical chic for white youth during the punky-reggae era; John Lydon was a
fan, and even persuaded Virgin to sign the DJ for their Front Line reggae
imprint. Songs like "Is Dread In A Babylon" and "Every Nigger Is
A Star" capture the militancy of a period when Jamaica was feeling the cultural
tug of postcolonial Africa while remaining
geopolitically very much within the American sphere of influence/interference.
Perhaps that's one reason Big Youth forged connections with the US's own black
"enemy within", interpolating lyrics from the Last Poets into
"Jim Screechy".

Worth
acquiring just for the glorious rhythm tracks over which Big Youth toasts,
Natty Universal Dread is Blood & Fire's best since their Heart of the
Congos reissue, and typically for the label, this 3-CD set is a beautifully
designed fetish object. Trojan's A Jamaican Story is a curious looking thing,
by comparison. Culled from this veteran label's formidable archives, its
cardboard chest contains 10 smaller boxes, shiny packets that look like bars of
Ritter chocolate. Each of these three-CD micro-boxes is devoted to one era or
aspect of reggae history: ska, rocksteady, lovers, DJ, et al. Unlike the Big
Youth set's exhaustive annotations and accompanying essay, there's minimal
information provided, just a rudimentary sketch of the specific genres. You
don't even get dates of recording/ release, or the identity of the producer and
the engineer who did the mix (absolutely crucial information with dub).
Truthfully, it's hard to know who A Jamaican Story is targeted at. Reggae
fiends will want Blood & Fire-style data overkill (plus those vintage photo
overlays and deliberately faded-looking graphics that emphasise the sense of
bygone times), while neophytes are hardly going to shell out a few hundred quid
for this thirty CD colossus.

All
that said, it's impossible to quibble with the quality of music here: Story is
a treasure chest. Its span stretches from Desmond Dekker to Scientist, a sonic
journey from ska's two-dimensional cartoon jerkiness to dub's haze-infused
chambers of deep space. Story also serves to remind just how much Jamaican pop
falls outside the rudeboy/rootsman dialectic---there's goofy instrumentals,
novelty songs, topical social comment, pure dance music, and love song after
gorgeous love song. What's faintly terrifying, though, is that, as crazily
copious and encompassing as it is, A Jamaican Story still warrants that
indefinite article: 500 tracks long, it only scratches the surface of reggae's
ocean of sound